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Human Rights and Their Critics (LAW373H1S)

Scholarship and jurisprudence on human rights is burgeoning at a time when the discourse of human rights is assuming an increasingly powerful role in comprehending relations between citizens and states, competing conceptions of global justice, global economic inequality, processes of economic globalization, and new forms of nationalism that challenge liberal conceptions of domestic and international justice. The dominance of human rights discourse is not only apparent in international institutions vested with the authority of legal norm production but also in the increasing tendency of jurisdictions at various sub-international levels to borrow approaches to human rights and tailor them to specific circumstances. The multi-level production and borrowing of human rights norms often occur without critical reflection on the normative, political and material consequences of these processes. Focusing primarily on academic literature from law, political theory and moral philosophy, this course will provide an introduction to debates among those supportive and those critical of human rights as instruments of global and local justice.

Evaluation

will be by a double spaced essay (from 6,000 to 7,000 words in length), related to the themes of the course (90%) and class participation (10%).